


Great Triumphant Sound

by liadan14



Series: Can I Go Where You Go? [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, I mean that in a nice way, M/M, Non-Chronological, also some Neville/Harry, my personal love letter to Ginny Weasley, previous Harry/Ginny - Freeform, what if these people were as obnoxious and promiscuous as real teenagers?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:07:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21597379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: Ginny had always wanted to shine. She had needed so desperately to be seen that Voldemort hoodwinked her into strangling chickens for a whole school year. Neville had desperately longed for invisibility. They found each other, eventually, by way of Harry, who had both the things they wanted and no clue what he was doing with them.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom/Ginny Weasley, Seamus Finnigan/Dean Thomas
Series: Can I Go Where You Go? [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1556482
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Great Triumphant Sound

**Author's Note:**

> HEY FOLKS HERE WE ARE THE NEVILLE/GINNY STORY IN MY HEART
> 
> Ngl, this is a MESS I am not even halfway done writing this yet, but I currently have THE most stressful phase of my professional life seguing into more stressful things coming after that, so if I don't start posting this now I never will. This fic will have shorter chapters and I will try to split flashbacks and moments that are part of _chandelier still flickering here_ by chapter.
> 
> Also, yes, the chapter titles will still be all lower-case song lyrics because I am a douchebag. HAVE FUN WITH THAT. Couldn't bring myself to make the fic title all lower-case, too. It's from Maggie Rogers' _Back in my Body_. And I do regret the name of the last fic deeply because now I had to type that out.

Neville and Ginny first met when Ginny was in her second year. They’d seen each other before, of course, exchanged greetings, shared a dinner table and a common room, but she was Ron’s little sister and he was even less cool than Ron. They had had no reason to talk.

In her first year, Ginny had been so determined to be the best of all her siblings, to shine in ways they hadn’t, to prove herself. Her second year, Ginny just wanted to survive. She’d missed her chance with the girls in her dormitory. Annabel Clearwater and Louise Bones had already become best friends while Ginny was busy becoming best friends with Tom Riddle. They were friendly with her, but they weren’t her friends. She’d missed half her herbology classes, because Tom had thought of it as a waste of her skills, time Ginny could spend better slaughtering chickens for him. Professor Sprout had only been saved having to fail her by exams being cancelled at the end of last year.

Too proud to sit in with the first year classes, Ginny devoted her weekends to the library, to playing catch-up and trying not to notice Colin Creevey doing the same.

When Ginny struggled to so much as look at the mandrakes she was supposed to repot, Professor Sprout introduced her to Neville.

“Of course I know Ginny,” Neville said, smiling at her like they chatted daily. 

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Professor Sprout said with a twinkle in her eye.

(When she was seventeen, Ginny went to Professor Sprout with the scars lining her sides from the Carrows’ more inventive sessions still healing. “I wanted to thank you,” she said. “For letting me catch up in second year, and not holding it against me that I’d missed so much.”

Professor Sprout smiled at her, said, “You were so small then, you know, and so very determined. How could I hold anything against you, Ginny? You were twelve.”

Ginny had almost started crying, then, but Professor Sprout had already been turning away, pulling on her gloves and saying, “Now then, are you going to stand there or are you going to help me with the murmuring marguerites?”)

Ginny and Neville spent weeks in Greenhouse Four, which she had ransacked last year on Tom’s orders, because he’d assumed that was where the mandrakes were. They had been, in his time. Ginny hadn’t corrected him.

Neville was less bumbling, alone, than Ginny had seen him before. There was no one there to speak faster than him, to move with more grace, and maybe it was the lack of comparison that made him so easy to be around, but maybe it was that he was at ease himself here, surrounded by dirt and growing things.,

“See,” he said. “You’ve just go to tickle them a little with your thumbs and they’ll let you see the undersides of the leaves and check for spots.” His ears, at thirteen, were ridiculous, but his voice was kind and Ginny let him teach her how to hold the whispering wisteria.

She still balked at the mandrakes.

“I won’t do it,” she said. “I won’t.”

“It’s not so bad,” Neville said. “I was scared the first time, too, but they’re just babies. They don’t mean anything by all the screaming.”

“I _won’t_.”

Something must have shown in her face or her tone of voice, she thought, or Neville had caught the way her hands were shaking before she clenched them into tight fists by her sides.

Either way, he asked her what was wrong.

Maybe it was because neither Ron nor Harry had mentioned it since, or it was because her parents had oscillated between pretending nothing was wrong and tiptoeing around her all summer, but Ginny sat down beside Neville in the dirt of Greenhouse Four and told him everything.

“And now, “she finished, “it’s like nothing ever happened. No one mentions it, but I almost killed them all. Hermione and Colin and, and Mrs. Norris, but it’s like no one remembers that _I did that_.”

“You didn’t kill them, though,” Neville said.

“I could have.”

“You _didn’t_ though. And you didn’t destroy the mandrakes. You just said.”

Ginny gathered a clump of dirt in her hands, squished it into bits. “I guess.”

“You said it was You-Know-Who, in that book, telling you what to do all year.”

“Yeah,” Ginny said. “I should have known better. I shouldn’t have _listened_.”

“I’m sorry I never noticed,” Neville said. “I wish I could have helped.”

Ginny gathered up more dirt.

“You now, my parents are in St. Mungo’s,” Neville said.

Ginny looked at him, surprised. She wasn’t sure if she should say she was sorry, or ask about it. It seemed an odd thing for him to mention, now. But he was staring at his feet, his ears flushed.

“I mean, they live there,” he added. “All the time. You-Know-Who’s followers tortured them in the war. They’re not…they’re not all there, anymore. That’s why I live with my Gran.”

“I’m sorry,” Ginny said.

Neville shrugged. “They never gave up. And I know they didn’t give up because they loved me and they wanted me safe.”

Ginny said nothing.

“And those were just his followers. You had him in your head, all year, and you’re still here, you’re not in St. Mungo’s. You’ve still got a chance. Seems to me like the Gryffindor thing to do is to take those mandrakes by the hair and, and keep on fighting.”

So Ginny did.

She never told him, that year, but it was his steady tutoring in Herbology, how pleased he always looked when she kept turning up to help him repot and care for the rows and rows of flowers even long after she didn’t need any help anymore, that gave her the courage she needed to talk to Colin Creevey in the library. To seek out Hermione to apologize and, in doing so, find her first female friend at Hogwarts.

**Author's Note:**

> hi also if you have ideas of scenes that should be in this fic feel free to tell me at [my tumblr](https://www.bewires.tumblr.com).


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